Sunday, October 30, 2011

brief thoughts about the genesis of belief

I have this strange intuition that a lot of confusion in the philosophies of mind and language arises from the fact that representations are used to explain, first, two quite different activities: (1) planning, and (2) correction, and second, two quite different kinds of things: (3) individuals, and (4) groups.

Individual planning that leads to representational explanations occur when, for example, the crow goes offline and then suddenly performs some novel activity, for example bending the paperclip in a way that allows her to unlock the cage. The best explanation is that the crow was running out counterfactuals in her mind, counterfactuals that bear a systematic relation to causal facts in the world (see THIS POST and THIS POST for a link to a relevant discussions). Mark Okrent explains intentionality in this manner, and work on counterfactual and off-line reasoning by others can help fill in the details (my student Joel Okrent and I have just started a paper on this).

Group correction is more complicated. Of course, as Feyerabend said, when conversation breaks down, then we must resort to violence. But the enlightenment ideal that we can adjudicate differences without violence rests on what Crispin Wright calls "cognitive command," the view that when two people are disagreeing, there must be some deficiency in one of them or their environment. In Truth and Objectivity, Wright has a brilliant discussion of how this gives rise to representational pictures.

But of course Wright's route to representation is radically different from Okrent's. So just as platonism is in part remarkable because it points to one thing to explain so many different things, so is representationalism more generally.

Now I have three Heideggerian commitments added to this. (1) Correction is primordial/originary. Note that unless the crow is countenancing different strategies and rejecting the wrong ones, we would have little reason to posit representational beliefs. So planning only entails representation to the extent that correction does. (2) In a sense the group is primordial or originary. Pace social pragmatists when they are being uncareful, I do not think this is the case because norms require some kind of metaphysical foundation in group dynamics. But rather, correcting oneself requires seperating oneself into two different perspectives, the corrector and the corrected. When we explain the crow doing this, we are really thinking of two crows inhabiting the same crow body (its immaterial whether the crow thinks of things that way). But this is already a group phenomenon. (3) Likewise, if we understand how language helps with social planning, we'll have a much better understanding of how we use it to plan ourselves. In social planning the group doesn't just magically plot out counterfactuals, weigh one, and then pick one. To the extent that it makes sense to talk about the group desiring any course of action, this is because of communications among individuals. This requires a set of idealizations about the nature of content to be presupposed, namely that the different members mean the same thing by their words. This requires privatively abstracting away from all sorts of modal and valuative commitments (among other things), going to something less Zuhandenheity and more Vorhandeheity, in Heidegger's parlance. The more self conscious people are about themselves, the more they have to perform the same trick on their own beliefs. This, I think is the important sense of "making explicit," one that Brandom doesn't entirely get because he helps himself to a notion of theoretical (as opposed to practical) inference at the get go.

My biggest hunch here is that the entire debate about "narrow" and "wide" content in analytic philosophies of mind and language is just shadows cast on the wall from the above. But I'm going to think that through more. If I can get clear about the the manner in which Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit is not an absolute duality (but rather absolute Zuhandenheit coming from a myth of complete removal of all modal and valuative components) I think I can make this case.

Comments

brief thoughts about the genesis of belief

I have this strange intuition that a lot of confusion in the philosophies of mind and language arises from the fact that representations are used to explain, first, two quite different activities: (1) planning, and (2) correction, and second, two quite different kinds of things: (3) individuals, and (4) groups.

Individual planning that leads to representational explanations occur when, for example, the crow goes offline and then suddenly performs some novel activity, for example bending the paperclip in a way that allows her to unlock the cage. The best explanation is that the crow was running out counterfactuals in her mind, counterfactuals that bear a systematic relation to causal facts in the world (see THIS POST and THIS POST for a link to a relevant discussions). Mark Okrent explains intentionality in this manner, and work on counterfactual and off-line reasoning by others can help fill in the details (my student Joel Okrent and I have just started a paper on this).

Group correction is more complicated. Of course, as Feyerabend said, when conversation breaks down, then we must resort to violence. But the enlightenment ideal that we can adjudicate differences without violence rests on what Crispin Wright calls "cognitive command," the view that when two people are disagreeing, there must be some deficiency in one of them or their environment. In Truth and Objectivity, Wright has a brilliant discussion of how this gives rise to representational pictures.